What will Fusion Look Like?

Chances are, the look and feel of Fusion Applications will be closer to that of the PeopleSoft Enterprise appliations than to any of the other current product lines. PeopleSoft was the first of the major ERP vendors to commit completely a pure Internet architecture for its applications. It has been close to 6 years since the release of Peoplesoft 8.0, which completely abandoned any traditional client/server connectivity. As a result of their early commitment to a pure web-based system, PeopleSoft was significantly ahead of JD Edwards and Oracle in regard to desigining a solid user interface using only features available in a browser-based environment. Furthermore, PeopleSoft had a large dedicated User Experience group. These people had been doing extensive testing to determine how best to optimize the browser-based user interface and understand what it is that users want. For these reasons, Oracle is most likely to turn to the former PeopleSoft development team to design the UI and to craft the look and feel of the applications.

Oracle has stated publicly that Oracle Forms will not be utilized in Fusion applications. Where Fusion applications will probably diverge from existing PeopleSoft applications is that while PeopleSoft applications are all deployed using HTML, Fusion applications are expected to utilize DHTML. This change will allow the browser-based applications to look and feel more like traditional client/server based systems. One example of where DHTML will improve performance is that with HTML, any change to a screen requires the entire page to be refreshed. So, by only refreshing those areas of a screen that need to react to the user's actions, the page is updated more rapidly and more smoothly than if the entire page needs to be redrawn. Another potential use of DHTML is the addition of drag-and-drop capabilities to the application. Users have become so accustomed to this type of functionality in their Microsoft applications that they miss the ability to do this in web-based programs.

If, in fact, Oracle fully commits to DHTML and if the former PeopleSoft user experience team is given a relatively free hand to create a great front-end, the likelihood of having an excellent UI in Fusion applications is high. I expect that Fusion applications will have a more user-friendly front end of any current web deployed applications.